Hovhannes Bagramyan

Hovhannes Bagramyan (2 December 1897-21 September 1982) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union who commanded the 1st Baltic Front, the 3rd Belorussian Front, and the Baltic Military District during World War II. He was the first non-Slavic front commander of the Red Army, as he was of Armenian origin.

Biography
Hovhannes Bagramyan was born on 2 December 1897 in Chardakhlu, Elisabethpol Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Cardaqli, Azerbaijan) to a family of ethnic Armenians. Bagramyan volunteered in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I, fighting the genocidal Ottoman armies in the Caucasus and in Persia. He served in the army of Armenia during its war with Turkey from 1917 to 1920, and he later defected to the Bolsheviks when the Red Army invaded Armenia. Bagramyan became a cavalry commander, and he graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in 1934.

Bagramyan survived the Great Purge despite his nationalist views, and he was given a command under Georgy Zhukov in 1940. Bagramyan became the chief of staff of the Soviet Southwestern Front in the Ukrainian SSR shortly before Operation Barbarossa dragged the Soviet Union into World War II. He became the subordinate of Mikhail Kirponos, the commander of the Southwestern Front, and Kirponos did not heed Bagramyan's warning that Nazi Germany would use blitzkrieg tactics against the USSR. Bagramyan escaped the disaster at the First Battle of Kiev in 1941, in which Kirponos was killed in action. Bagramyan planned two counter-offensives against the German Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa, and he replaced Semyon Timoshenko after the failed offensive on Kharkov in early 1942. Bagramyan's 11th Guards Army took part in the Battle of Kursk in 1943, and he was promoted to Colonel-General on 28 July 1943.

After Kursk, Joseph Stalin made Bagramyan the commander of the 1st Baltic Front of the Red Army. In the winter of 1943, his troops advanced on Vitebsk during the Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive, and he was one of the geniuses behind Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944; on 7 July 1944, he was awarded the title of "Hero of the Soviet Union". His Baltic front would invade Latvia, capturing Riga in late July after advancing from Siauliai in Lithuania. On 10 October, his forces encircled Army Group North at the port city of Memel (Klaipeda, Lithuania), and his front would take part in the East Prussian Offensive and the Battle of Koenigsberg. On 9 May 1945, he accepted the surrender of the last German forces in Latvia, the Courland Pocket, ending the war in the Baltics. After the war, he put down Lithuanian and Latvian partisans from the "Forest Brothers", and he died in 1982 at the age of 84, the last surviving Soviet marshal to have held a major war command.